Yes, running your own business requires you to crunch numbers. If you never took a statistics or calculus class in college, you shouldn’t have to worry about racking your brain with tons of math. Today’s technology is well equipped with the tools you need to grab analytics and put them in the right perspective to help improve your business.

Still, you should have at least a little bit of background to understand what those numbers mean for you and your company. If you’re new to the online retail game, take a look at these breakdowns of the most important analytics for your company.

Perhaps one of the most popular free analytics programs across the web, Google Analytics gives you a snapshot and deep-dive numbers regarding your site’s performance on Google. A customizable dashboard offers you all sorts of crucial data like individual visits, referrals, locational data and tons more. All Google Analytics requires to get started is a bit of auto-generated code placed on all of the pages of your site. If you’re using a comprehensive ecommerce software solution like 3DCart, you can take advantage of built-in analytics reporting that extends your understanding of how you do business. Rather than just giving you insights on who visits your site, you can get real-time looks at customer activity, marketing campaigns, payment and shipping types, sales numbers and other statistics to understand how effective your sales process. Used in tune with Google Analytics, you’ll have a full view of how your marketing and sales strategies work together. Now that you have a bird’s eye view of your site’s performance, dig deeper by viewing statistics around your products. Take a look at top-selling items, monthly and daily product activity, gift certificate sales, inventory results and more. These stats allow you to put a greater focus on the products that are selling well and control your inventory based on your sales numbers. You won’t get a specially developed ROI tracking module with every shopping cart software solution, but vendors like 3DCart offer it as a great extra analytics feature. ROI tracking focuses on all of the things that help your business cash-in, including the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, sales and leads from affiliate sites, search engines, email marketing software, pay-per-click services, keywords and phrases and more. Online advertisers rely heavily on Google AdWords, a service that posts an ad for your business at the top of Google search results for a given keyword or phrase. You need to track the effectiveness of these campaigns or you could be wasting money on key phrases that aren’t very effective in driving traffic to your site.